Densho Digital Archive - George H. Morishita Interview (denshovh-mgeorge

<Begin Segment 21>

KL: You guys, I think it was you and Mas were telling me about a haunted house that you set up.

GM: No, what we did was, again, one of the barracks for a while next to the mess hall was empty, they stored linoleum, I mean, that tarpaper, rows of tarpaper. So we broke underneath some of the boards, and apparently they didn't put the linoleum yet, and we put rolls of this tarpaper thing, and we covered it and made it dark, and we used to play ghost in there. And the last time we did that, Eddie or I or one of the older guys would play the boogeyman, and we'd send the little younger guys though there, and one of the older guys would scare them. So one day after we were playing and we were standing, might have been about ten of us, laughing away. And three of us, including me, saw the same thing, smoke-like, and it came in and went right into this thing. It didn't bounce off like smoke would bounce off. And we, all three of us went, "Oh," and we described what we saw, identical things. So then Eddie said we'd better go, and we let the little kids out first, and we went out in the basement floor, we never went back in there. But I saw this coming in and two of my friends saw it at the same time, and we described it. Because Eddie said whoever it was that didn't see it, said, "Describe it," it was the same thing. I believe in ghosts now.

KL: That was a Block 5 building?

GM: Yeah. The building next to the mess hall. For a while it was empty with just a... yeah, I'm not sure if that was the rec. hall.

KL: Was it across the central aisle from it, or was it...

GM: I thought it was right next to it.

KL: So one of the barracks.

GM: Apartment, building 14? Yeah, I thought. So it could have been early on, because eventually we had people living in there, I'm not sure. But we had all these tarpaper rolls in there.

KL: Were there any other legends or ghost stories or anything that circulated around Manzanar about the place?

GM: Not that I can remember.

KL: Did you guys have any ideas or any knowledge of people who had lived at Manzanar before it was a camp? Did you ever talk about who...

GM: You know, I didn't know. I found that out later, yeah, later.